Ximian Desktop 2, Evolution Released

An anonymous reader writes "Ximian has released their long awaited Ximian Desktop 2, their popular Gnome-based desktop, and Evolution, their popular email client and calendar program. They can be found on the main Ftp server. You can also check their mirrors."

Comments

Progress

[js995]

With all that has been said on the issue of GUI's on Linux, its great to see consistently improved releases across the board. Ximian 2 looks great, and the closely tied integration of OpenOffice is the kind of thing that will probably be appealing to those looking to roll Linux out to corporate desktops. Seems to be the 1.0 branch though, which is a shame since there are a lot of useful enhancements in the 1.1 series.

Re:Yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

and 71.9 seconds slower than mutt!

Since switching away from Windows, I will never again understand the use of graphical email clients... it's like using your TV as a letter opener IMHO ;)

Easy to remove?

[macemoneta]

Is it easy to de-install and return to a pristine (current distribution level) state yet? The last time I tried this, which is required when performing a distribution update with Redhat, it required a couple of hours dependency resolution. As a result, I never re-installed after the distribution upgrade. Redhat now includes Evolution, and the new "--aid" option on rpm makes automatically pulling in dependencies much easier (I don't need Red-Carpet).

Re:Easy to remove?

[luge]

It's never going to be easy to just remove 200+ packages, so no, you can't just return to a pristine distro. [And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity. :) But we have gone to a great deal of effort to match our versions, epochs, and package names with those of the distro so that distro upgrades to the next revision of the distro should go more smoothly than it did with XG1.4.

Re:Easy to remove?

[passthecrackpipe]

A question I have had for a *very* long time. Why ship all those packages? Why essentially make a distro-in-a-distro? I appreciate that some of the stuff you would need would require some patching, but why not do what everyone else does, and submit upstream? You are, at the end of the day, not only forking Linux to an extent, but also invalidating any hope of support the unsuspecting victim may have from his original distro. when I orginally got XD1, I noticed Ximian was installing 200+ packages that *were already on my machine*. Not a good sign. More like a sign of hopeless architecture, to me. Not to knock Ximian too hard (I do that in another post ;-) ) , but I would really like to understand the technical reasoning behind that particular design decision.

Oh, and "can't be bothered / can't convince the upstream amaintainers to accept my patches" is not an answer. So far, all I can see is that Ximian is trying to get the same lock-in on my desktop that Microsoft has....

Re:"Popular" ?

[luge]

Well, our press release points out we had roughly a million and a half installations of Ximian GNOME 1.4. And we had... well, we had a whole lot of downloads this morning well before it hit any community news sites, from people sitting and reloading ftp.ximian.com all night. :) So, I guess 'popular' is totally subjective, but I think it's fair to say there is at least some interest out there. :)

Torrent link?

[42forty-two42]

Anyone have a bittorrent for this one?

Re:"Popular" ?

[BlackHawk-666]

That said, though, I'd like to retain "compatibility" with Mutt if at all possible, so that I can use Mutt to read new or old mail without interfering with the operation of Evolution.

Just keep your mail on your mail server and use IMAP to connect to it. Then you can use Mutt, Evolution, KMail, Netscape/Mozilla or even Outlook ot get at your mail. Best of all, you can access it while you are at work too ;-) I presonally use Kmail when I'm at home, Mozilla if I have to boot Windows for a bit, Pine when I shell in, and Mozilla from work (since Outlook acted all pissy about it for no good reason). IMAP means enjoying your mail no matter where you are.

You can also move all your contacts and stuff into an LDAP server for bonus points. Now I have one address book which I can use wherever I am with all my email clients on any OS. Only downside, I have yet to find a decent client to update that LDAP address book...anyone got some recomendations?